Michael Ridenhour

Calm down everybody. I’m antsy too but a quarter of our portal additions last year didn’t come until late April. I’m annoyed that Odom isn’t going to get Terrance Hill and approach some top guys but our last top 100 guy we got was Thomas and we overpaid. Trust Odom he has plan.

St. Ambrose (c. 340–397): Established the Ambrosian Rite and the model of "Grandeur." He introduced the "High Church" aesthetic and the cult of relics to replace pagan Roman civic religion. Vigilantius (c. 400): The first major dissenter. He attacked the "Ambrose model" as paganism with Christian names. He was slandered by St. Jerome as a "Jewish thinker" for his literalism. Claude of Turin (c. 817–827): A Carolingian Bishop who launched a radical "Iconoclasm" in the Alps. He removed crosses and images, arguing that the Pope has no authority if he does not live like an Apostle. He is the bridge between the 4th-century protest and the medieval underground. Claude has many followers in the mountains, which went underground when needed. The Waldensians: Emerged in the 1170s under Peter Waldo. They adopted a vow of absolute poverty and fled to the alpine valleys once ruled by Claude. They spread the gospel through their connection to the cloth trade, bringing pieces of the Bible in venecular language hidden in bundles of cloth. To weavers and to the aristocracy that bought the finished products. If you overlap those trade routes you will find they correspond to areas where the Reformation "broke out." The Constantinian Fall: They formulated the theory that the Church died spiritually under Pope Sylvester (c. 314) when it accepted wealth from Emperor Constantine. They claimed to be the "True Church" of the "Poor Peter." The Church branded the claim of apostolic poverty as "Jewish" and "heretical," using the legal distinction between the Person of Peter (poor) and the Office of the Pope (wealthy). Marseille (1318): Four Franciscan Spirituals were burned for refusing to abandon the "ragged tunics" and absolute poverty of Peter. Decree "Cum inter nonnullos" (1323): Issued by Pope John XXII. The Verdict: It is officially heresy to say that Jesus and the Apostles owned nothing. This decree criminalized the imitation of Peter’s poverty, making the "Petrine Dissent" a capital offense. The Intellectual Revolt (1324 – 1347) William of Ockham: A logician who fled to Munich from Rome. He argued that since the Decree of 1323 contradicted the Gospel, the Pope was a heretic. Ockham provided the legal framework to defy Rome: if the Pope contradicts Scripture, he ceases to be Pope. The Reformation Bridge: Ockham’s writings, combined with Waldensian survival, preserved the "Petrine Dissent" until it reached Wycliffe, Hus, and eventually Luther. This is a very brief synopsis. The Waldensians are extraordinarily important and most Christians are unaware of them at all.